Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader is a wonderful program. It’s main function seems to be to sense when you are deeply involved in writing something you haven’t yet saved, and interrupting you with a notice that it is time to update Adobe Reader. In the old days, this would mean that you had to stop and either update or ask it to wait until later. Now, combined with Macintosh Lion, it’s gotten even better. The little updating announcement remains hidden, so your whole computer just slows down, but you have no idea why. You can’t input to your file. If you are running Itunes, the music stops and the wheel of death comes on. You start going from program to program, quitting the ones you can, to find the problem. If this takes too long your Mac hangs up, even the Force Quit won’t come up, and all is lost. I am writing this on my backup laptop, as I watch my number one laptop try to reboot, going on twenty minutes.

Adobe Reader has another feature, which is to allow one to read pdf files. This is actually useful.

It seems that in order to have this secondary feature, while bypassing the main function, all one has to do is go to preferences and say you don’t want to hear about new releases, you’ll check for yourself. If and when my main laptop regains consciousness, I’ll try this. What the penalty is for not promptly updating, I’m not sure. How bad can it be?

“Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Adobe Reader / Acrobat, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges and by malicious people to disclose potentially sensitive information, bypass certain security restrictions, and compromise a user’s system.”

The last two updates have the same description.

I’d recommend not having this software unless you have to – Preview is perfectly capable of showing most PDF files, if you can get away without Reader, do!

No but yea, Adobe sucks I dont know about Mac products but in Windows there is a separate installation of Adobe updater. It whines about Flash and Adobe. Funny thing is that it’s default set to auto-update many a times and doesnt even ask my consent. I dont want Adobe installing anything on my comp, unless it’s specifically granted. Im pretty sure that an older version of Adobe/Acrobat Reader on Windows had highlighting and Annotations (or something I particularly liked years and years ago) but it auto updated on me and wasnt in the newer version.

Adobe Reader wants to update so frequently, because it’s a freaking big piece of software, with a lot of security issues included. It contains more lines of code than the whole Windows operating systems, and it includes thousand of functions that you probably don’t want.
Better than not updating is probably removing it completely. Sumatra or Foxit are much better alternatives for displaying PDF, and this is probably what you want.

If you are heavily involved in procrastinating away your tasks, be sure to also open an instance of Gimp and another one of Inkscape (if you are really, really sure you don’t want to work, add Scribus to the list). These are guaranteed (together with a dose of iTunes) to slow down your machine, so that when Adobe gives the “coup de grace” you can only hard-shutdown the system and have a lot of patience.

Mac’s are wonderful computers, their main feature seems to be hanging and eventually crashing over simple update processes that cause absolutely no problems for other operating systems. Even their end-all Force-Quit option fails in the face of a simple update notification, as opposed to the task manager which often works regardless of a frozen program. Maybe a memory upgrade would help fix this problem, but that usually involves buying a new computer now doesn’t it? Oh, wait, that’s only Mac computers.

The penalty for not updating can be pretty severe – adobe products are actually one of the largest sources of security vulnerabilities – particularly on the windows side, but some liability exists on OS X as well (and with that track record, one probably doesn’t want to guess).

More importantly, however, acrobat reader offers few improvements over Apple’s own Preview app – and Preview has none of the wonderful feature that you highlight above. So, if you can, my suggestion is ditch Adobe’s reader and stick with Apple’s stand-in.

Adobe treats updating their products as the single most important task you can do with your computer.
Often when right clicking for ‘help’ on syntax in flash, the process is derailed by a window asking to you update to this hour’s update of AIR. Telling it to piss or proceed yields the same result: The help system gets confused and asks you to start over. BRILLIANT!

If you don’t update Adobe Reader, then you will visit a web page which will use a security hole in Adobe Reader to compromise your computer and steal your passwords and your money, and do other mischief.

Adobe’s other well known feature is allowing remote exploits to run. The update feature is there to annoy you to the point of turning it off, so that when a malicious PDF file comes your way it won’t have trouble exploiting the out of date version you’re running.

Adobe, I’ve always said, is without contest the most arrogant company on the face of planet earth.

For a program I might use twice a year to open and print an IRS tax form to need updated weekly, and for them to keep putting their Go* *ucking *amn *ucking icon on my desktop with every update no matter how many times I delete the little POS…

If you fail to update Adobe Reader a plague of locusts will descend upon your fields and they shall remain barren for three generations. In all seriousness how many times does the program really need to update itself?